The U.S. is staring at a Netflix-type apocalypse. You know, with feral animals eating human corpses, mutant plants reoccupying streets and buildings, empty restaurants and malls across the landscape….

Well, that last part is true, anyway.Not because of the disease but rather hysteria.

You’ve heard the apocalyptic claims. Imperial College in London – in a claim that would later get walked way back to far less fanfare* –estimated as many as 2.2 million U.S. deaths, depending on how drastically the population is locked down, locked out, and locked in. To reduce that figure to a “mere” 1.1 million, we would need to live a gulag life “until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more),”they said.The CDChas issued an estimateof as many as 1.7 million American deaths.

Consider that China has hadfewer than 3,300 deaths even though the virus struck a country with a lousy healthcare system wholly unaware. Their epidemic peakedover five weeks ago,with almost no new cases now. So with a vastly better health care system, the U.S. can expect a per capita death rate about 666 times higher than the Middle Kingdom? Seriously, Imperial College?

You can quit reading right there. But please don’t. The utter insanity here is worth documenting, as well as knowing why even the lower bound U.S. estimates are nonsense.

EPIDEMICS ALWAYS FLATTEN AND DECLINE ON THEIR OWN

Fact is, the epidemic worldwide, far from “growing exponentially,” is slowing.And that was to be expected per what’s called “Farr’s Law,” which dictates that allepidemics tend to rise and fall in a roughly symmetrical pattern or bell-shaped curve.AIDS, SARS, Ebola, Zika – all followed that pattern. So does seasonal flu each year. COVID-19peaks have already been reported in China, South Korea, and Singapore.

Importantly, Farr’s Law has nothing to do with human interventions such as “social distancing” to “flatten the curve,” and indeedpredates public health organizations. It occurs because communicable diseases nab the “low-hanging fruit” first (in this case the elderly with comorbid conditions), but then find subsequent fruit harder and harder to reach.Until more or less now, COVID-19 has been finding that fresh fruit in new countries, but it’s close to running out. So while many people assume that China contained its epidemic with draconian regulations, we actually have no evidence of that. Even theNew York TimesadmittedSouth Korea recovered far more quickly with measures nowhere on the scale of China, although of course theTimesstill attributes that to human intervention, which assigning no role to Mother Nature.

When the coronavirus epidemic ends and the public health zealots inevitably slap themselves on the back for having prevented their own ridiculous scenarios, don’t buy it. This isn’t to say that thorough hand-washing several times a day and not sneezing and coughing in others’ faces won’thelp: It will. But without theauthoritarianandeconomically-devastatingmeasures the U.S. and other countries are taking that are wrecking the world economy, there will be no Apocalypse Now or in the future. The streets are empty not because of direct effects of the disease, but from fear and from government dictates; as in a cognate of “dictatorship.”

Mind, right now we’re seeing a spike in cases becauseonly now is testing becoming readily available in the U.S. due to a delay in the CDC developing its own assay. This availability is almost universally hailed as only good, but has at least two bad aspects.

First, we’re now picking up a lot more asymptomatic people who will be counted as “cases” just as much as people on death’s door. This will further contribute to hysteria. Second, many who test positive will suddenly develop “nocebo” symptoms; the opposite of placebo. As I observed long ago, nocebo symptoms come from the mind but can be very real. They definitely can mimic COVID-19 symptoms. It’s a good guess that hospitals are seeing their share of the “worried well,” people who were feeling pretty well before they tested positive and suddenly truly feel deathly ill. And they’re not the only ones suffering as a result. This adds to the burden on severely stressed hospital workers already overwhelmed with patients whose symptoms do result from COVID-19—or from the many other ailments and injuries that haven’t stopped afflicting people while our attention is focused on this particular virus.

On the positive side (no pun intended), the more you test, the lower the deathratebecomes because the denominator grows faster than the numerator. Rather than the 3.4% ratethe WHO put out,the current crude U.S. death rate isABOUT 1.6%and will probably drop to less than half that as we’ve seen so farin South Koreaat0.6%.Then as testing continues, the rate will drop even further. For the Imperial College figure to be correct, U.S. deaths would have to be 0.66 percent andevery American would need to be infected.

THE ITALIAN JOB

So how many deaths can the U.S. reasonably expect? If it’s not the Chinese model, it appears to bethe Italian one. At the least,the media tell us, “Italy’s Coronavirus Crisis Could Be America’s.” Really?

That country so far has had over 7,500 deathsout of a population of 50 million, but it appears cases peaked on March 21.

Still, at this point that’s a stunning 9.5% crude death rate, by far the highest death percentage in the world. Which of course is why the media choose to focus on it, rather than other countries such as Germany with only about 240deaths out of a much larger population.

But why is this happening in Italy? Partly it’s because Italy just doesn’t have a particularly good health care system. Even more specifically, last year the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Securityranked theU.S.the best-prepared countryin the world to handle a pandemic in late 2019, whereas Italy came in at only 31 – below Mexico.

Beyond that, Italy hasthe fifth oldest population in the world(whereas the U.S. ranks 61). We already knew from Chinese data that COVID-19 is overwhelmingly a killer of the old and infirm.An analysisby China’s Center for Disease Control & Prevention found that most deaths occurred in those aged 80 and over.

Further, almost all those elderly dead had “comorbid” conditions of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or hypertension. Similarly, almost everyone who has died in Italyhas been over age 70,and virtually all had comorbid conditions: In fact, half of those who died had three or more. Almost nobody under 50 has succumbed and almost all who have also had serious existing medical conditions. This is a condemnation of the nation’s health care system; not a portent of America’s future.

And it appears a major factor may be how cases are recorded, which makes the assumption that dying from COVID-19 is the same as dyingwithit. Given the strong overlap between the population susceptible to flu and COVID-19, it’s certain that many who actually succumbed to flu are marked as coronavirus cases. We can expect that in the U.S. as well.

The media and public health alarmists also cite MERS-CoV as an exception, but there’sevidence that it is also complains: “If it’s not the damned heat, it’s the humidity!”This year, the flupeaked in February. So it’s possible that even now weather is affecting U.S. coronavirus spread. Will it come back in autumn? Probably. But by then many in the population will have had exposure immunity, hospitals will be better prepared, the worried well problem will be reduced because it will no longer be a “new” virus, and we’ll have time to see if anything in our arsenal of antivirals and other medicines is truly effective.(No, there will be no vaccine available.)

Meanwhile, we apparently have a new definition for “American exceptionalism.” Ignore what’s happening in the entire rest of the world; ignore epidemiology; ignore virology; ignore common sense; ignore history. America, as Johnny Cash sang: “God’s Gonna Cut You Down.” Just as SARS was supposed to (itkilled zero Americans) and just as forecasters (seriously)predicted more American AIDS deathsthan there were Americans.

But as always we follow the dictates of the public health zealots, the media and power-hungry pols. Shame on us that after all these years we are once again ignoring reality for the dubious benefits of hysteria.

*Note: As this article was being written, Neil Ferguson, the head of the Imperial College study, simply threw his model away. Along with the U.S. one of 2.2 million deaths, he predicted the U.K. would have as many as 510,000 deaths. In an oral presentationhe reduced the U.K figureslightly… to 20,000. So the model that launched a thousand articles wasn’t worth anything more than the pixels it appeared with.

Michael Fumento is an attorney, author, and journalist who has been documenting epidemic hysterias for 35 years. He may be reached at Fumento@gmail.com.